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December 1, 2011

[Mrs. Clinton met the country’s new president, U Thein Sein, on Thursday morning and its main opposition leader, the Nobel peace laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, later in the day, underscoring the Obama administration’s cautious efforts to nurture a thaw in one of the world’s most isolated and repressive nations. In each meeting, Mrs. Clinton delivered a letter from President Obama, expressing support for the democratization of Myanmar.]

By Steven Lee Myers

Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's opposition leader,

in Yangon on Thursday.

YANGON, Myanmar — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Thursday that the United States would loosen some restrictions on international financial assistance and development programs in Myanmar, in response to a nascent political and economic opening in the country.

The United States and Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, also agreed to discuss upgrading diplomatic relations — which were suspended for two decades — and exchanging ambassadors, a step that could transform American diplomacy in Southeast Asia.

Mrs. Clinton met the country’s new president, U Thein Sein, on Thursday morning and its main opposition leader, the Nobel peace laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, later in the day, underscoring the Obama administration’s cautious efforts to nurture a thaw in one of the world’s most isolated and repressive nations. In each meeting, Mrs. Clinton delivered a letter from President Obama, expressing support for the democratization of Myanmar.

“For decades, the choices of this country’s leaders kept it apart from the global economy and the community of nations,” Mrs. Clinton said after meeting Mr. Thein Sein in Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s remote new capital. “Today, the United States is prepared to respond to reforms with measured steps to lessen its isolation and improve the lives of citizens.”

Mrs. Clinton met Mr. Thein Sein at the monumental presidential palace, erected along with the rest of the city only six years ago on what had been an obscure stretch of farmland about 200 miles north of Yangon, the country’s largest city. Mr. Thein Sein, a former general and prime minister in the previous military government, greeted Mrs. Clinton cordially, calling her visit as “a historic milestone” that he hoped would “open a new chapter in relations.”

Where that new chapter will lead depends on whether Mr. Thein Sein’s government takes additional steps to open up the country’s politics, release political prisoners and end the violent repression of minority ethnic groups in some of the world’s longest civil conflicts.

A senior Obama administration official said late Thursday that there was not yet any specific timetable for actions by either country, and that a full restoration of diplomatic relations appeared to be months away, at a minimum.

In her meetings and public statements, Mrs. Clinton said she raised a number of issues that have divided the United States and Myanmar since 1990, when the ruling military junta refused to acknowledge the results of elections won by Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy. Mrs. Clinton also called on Myanmar to “sever illicit ties to North Korea” that officials say has included work on ballistic missiles and, possibly, nuclear technology.

Even so, she sought to welcome and encourage the steps taken since Mr. Thein Sein became president in March, including lifting the ban on the National League for Democracy.

“It is also encouraging that Aung San Suu Kyi is now free to take part in the political process,” she said, “but that too will be insufficient unless all political parties can open offices throughout the country and compete in free, fair and credible elections.”

In a video conference with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Wednesday, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi acknowledged that her re-entry into the political process — like the American engagement — entailed risk.

She said that she trusted Mr. Thein Sein personally. But she added, “I cannot say that everybody in the government feels as he does.”

Asked if she agreed with that view, Mrs. Clinton demurred, though she said she understood that there were a variety of views within the government.

In two and a half hours of meetings with Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Thein Sein offered important signals of his intentions, senior administration officials said. He discussed legal steps for releasing additional political prisoners, for example, despite his recent public remarks asserting that the country did not have any.

There was little fanfare in the capital for Mrs. Clinton’s visit, the first by a secretary of state since 1955, and the broad boulevards her motorcade passed through were all but deserted.

The government newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, reported Mrs. Clinton’s visit in a two-paragraph article on Page 2, while printing on its front page the entire résumé of the prime minister of Belarus, who arrived for a visit on Thursday.

In the far more bustling metropolis of Yangon, Mrs. Clinton toured the ancient golden Shwedagon Pagoda, one of the most sacred Buddhist shrines in the country. Visitors there applauded on two occasions as a guide led her through the site, where she took part in rituals like the ringing of a giant bell and pouring water 11 times over a statue of Buddha.

She then met privately with Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi over dinner at the lakeside residence of the senior American diplomat in Myanmar. It was their first meeting, though they had previously spoken by telephone, and the two women greeted each other warmly. Mrs. Clinton recalled a signed poster from a women’s conference in Beijing when she was first lady, which Madeleine K. Albright, the secretary of state at the time, sent to Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi. She responded that the poster remained on the wall of one of her offices. “I am very happy to meet you, finally,” Mrs. Clinton said.

The steps Mrs. Clinton announced on Thursday were modest in scale but important symbolically. While the United States is not yet considering lifting the sweeping sanctions that ban most imports from Myanmar, she said, Washington will no longer block the World Bank and International Monetary Fund from carrying out assessment programs, and will support the expansion of United Nations development grants for health care and small businesses in Myanmar.

She also invited Myanmar to join the Lower Mekong Initiative, an American-sponsored regional association devoted to water issues, which already includes Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand. And she said she raised the possibility of joint missions to recover the remains of about 600 American soldiers who died in the country during World War II, similar to the effort to locate missing Americans in Vietnam.

“So we’re not at the point yet that we can consider lifting sanctions that we have in place, because of our ongoing concerns about policies that have to be reversed,” Mrs. Clinton said. “But any steps that the government takes will be carefully considered and will be, as I said, matched, because we want to see political and economic reform take hold.”